Here’s a relatively simple approach to lightning photography using a trusty blueboard –

[…] the most useful piece of data in the wikipedia article is the time lapse shot of a lightning strike. From the time lapse photo I was able to determine the duration of a lightning strike is about 100 ms. Then from this page I found my Canon 30d camera has a shutter lag of 65 ms. I know from a past project that if I use a reverse biased photo transistor to detect light it has a response time under 1 ms. The last piece of delay is the software running on the Arduino board and since itâ€™s running at 16 MHz I am sure I can run a tight loop that takes under 1 ms. Adding up all the delays, I get 67 ms which is still much less than the 100 ms duration of a lightning strike so I was pretty confident this would work before I started work on the prototype.

I was toying with this concept some years ago; apparently lightning-photographing-professionals have an AM radio by their side, tuned to as low a frequency as possible. There is meant to be a change in the static signal just before the lightning bolt. I suspect this would have to do with the charge of the surrounding air increasing. I wonder if the signal change is reliable enough to build a similar triggering device.